NCJ Number
192673
Date Published
2001
Length
16 pages
Annotation
This paper explores the implication of shifts in the way that security and justice are being promoted for the place and role of governmental violence in the maintenance of order.
Abstract
The paper claims that the emergence of a logic of risk as well as challenges to the established denunciatory and expiatory conception of justice is refiguring the way violence is being used as a tactic of governance. In examining this shift in governance, the paper explores its relationship to established concepts and practices of justice. It argues that justice, understood within the context of the reordering of the past, is much less of a concern within non-state arenas, where corporate victims are central, than it is within the state sphere, where individual victimization is more significant. Within non-state governance of security, an instrumental rather than a moral approach tends to predominate. This instrumental focus has meant that the question of justice, understood as a symbolic response to wrongdoing, tends to remain on the sidelines. In both a risk-oriented mentality of security and a restorative conception of justice, violence loses its privileged status as a strategy to be deployed in the ordering of security. This does not mean that it has been eclipsed as a strategy, rather that it is considered as one means among others to be used in the governance of security. Further, in both these emerging mentalities, the mechanisms of coercion within criminal justice come to be seen less as a device for inflicting pain and more as a set of resources to be considered in reducing risk. References